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Today, we are visiting one of the most sacred places on the Big Island - Waipio Valley. The valley was home to many early Hawaiian Kings and chiefs because it was well-protected and the land was extremely fertile for growing native taro plants. Today, the switchback road into the valley is so steep, only the most adept drivers with 4-wheel drive vehicles are able to visit the valley’s base and the pristine beach. Native Hawaiian people still farm the land in the same way they did hundreds of years ago. The cultural roots in this place are profound.

Where do your cultural roots run the deepest? Where is your family’s ancestral home? Do you feel most connected to the place you grew up, where you live now, or somewhere else?

Short answer: no fucking idea.

Long answer:

When I was a kid, in rural Virginia, you couldn't kick a clod of dirt without dislodging an arrowhead. I always had this idea that the place had been a Native American village. It was the perfect spot for it: right next to an estuary of the Potomac, also accessible by land.

Later, I found out that it was, indeed, a Native center of population. John freaking Smith himself described the place. The tribe that lived there was part of the Powhatan confederacy - you probably heard of them if you know anything about the non-Disneyfied story of Pocahontas - and the Potomac itself is named after them.

Descendants of this tribe finally got state, but not federal, recognition recently, and my friends and I donated a good number of artifacts to them. Their ancestral home was my childhood home, which is mine now by inheritance, and I couldn't imagine doing anything but honoring their legacy by gifting them these bits of history.

Archaeologists continue to explore the site. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing anyone would have heard of, and I've been pretty careful to keep it off the news. And not much is left; the flat parts have all been farmed since before I was born, and the hilly parts are covered in trees that get timbered every generation or so. There had also been a minor Civil War battle in that location, and in addition to the arrowheads and other artifacts, we found a lot of Civil War relics: buttons, bullets; in one spectacular find, an actual saber in an actual scabbard.

That's my only real connection to history. My genetic legacy is anyone's guess, and I'm not interested in doing one of those intrusive DNA tests that probably aren't very accurate, anyway. My light skin and blue eyes betray, as I've noted before, some sort of Northern European ancestry; I don't really care to know more. It makes no difference to who I am now, and I feel no more connection to anywhere in Europe than I do to, say, Nigeria.

As for my adoptive legacy, well, that doesn't matter much either, but I'm starting to piece together some things that are probably better off unknown. Again, nothing to do with who I am now.

I've mentioned before that I love travel. I've been all around the US, and a few other countries, and there are places that stick with me: the desolation of the Mojave, the cool blue of the Caribbean, the white peaks of the Cascades, England's hill country, the stink of the Niagara River, Maui's Haleakala, the Maya Mountains of Belize with their hints of an ancient civilization.

Virginia is my home, be it Tidewater or Piedmont. More than that, though, I'm more interested in what connects us than in what divides us - and what connects us is the ball of mud we all live on. I want to see more of it.